Erlang – The Driver behind WhatsApp’s success (Copenhagen)

May 22, 2014

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GoTo Night on 22nd May with Torben speaking on ‘Erlang- The Driver behind WhatsApp’s success

WhatsApp was recently acquired by Facebook for 19 billion USD, despite having only 10 people working in development and operations on the core messaging platform. How does such a small team create a platform that can handle 300,000 msg/s in-bound and 700,000 msg/s out-bound? One reason is their choice of Erlang, whose set of features is perfect for tackling this particular problem.

Torben Hoffman will present the main features of Erlang and how to create massively scalable as well as reliable systems. Besides looking at WhatsApp’s usage of Erlang, the talk will also give an overview of how it is used in gambling, ad serving and online news sites.

The focus is not on programming but on how the unique features of Erlang provide business benefits.

Torben Hoffman is CTO of Erlang Solutions Ltd. Prior to this he worked with Erlang in Motorola and Issuu as a technical architect and developer. Before becoming an Erlang evangelist he worked with software quality assurance, process improvement and people management.